Though the premise for this show – twenty-four sketches for twenty-four hours of the day – isn’t an entirely original one, it’s promising nonetheless. With sketch shows, simplicity is often best, and the two chairs and a symbolic clock propped up to the side of the stage make the set-up for this late show at Pembroke Cellars pleasingly minimalist.

Unfortunately, while the premise and layout for Twenty-Four were promising, the show falls flat due to the performers. Joe McGuchan and Alex Watson hindered comic effect by laughing within their own sketches several times in the initial half of the show. Breaks in character during a sketch show can sometimes be just as amusing as the sketches themselves, particularly in making the audience feel comfortable (something that is often crucial in a small and intimate space such as the New Cellars), but with the actors repeatedly doing so it quickly became tiresome and worked to deplete any chemistry that McGuchan and Watson may share.

The writing of Twenty-Four does have its funny moments. Each sketch has at least an attempt at a closing punchline, allowing the audience to feel the thought and effort that has been put into each one. The most consistent element of the writing is that of wordplay and other witticisms that give the impression that the entire show would be better received if read rather than staged. McGuchan often distinguishes himself from Watson as the more comfortable and capable performer on stage (his solo sketch, ‘Bob Wallace’s cooking for one’, was one of the few stand-outs of the show), but has a habit of starting out a sketch with an overwhelming burst of energy that, by its conclusion, has fizzled out entirely, leaving the audience more often than not underwhelmed.

A key issue for Twenty-Four is that it drags out sketches that would have been funny had they been tighter or more succinctly rendered. While the volume of sketches that was produced for the show is no doubt impressive, it presumably hindered the amount of time and effort the performers could have put into making sure they  could be as amusing as possible. More work and thought could and should have been put into imagining how these sketches would look to an audience.

Though the performers worked to pack into the script a good deal of verbal wit, this wasn’t always successful, and it came at the expense of physical presence on stage – miming was often hurried and done as though the performers were somehow embarrassed by it, and the rare use of props was much the same. Both performers’ potential for the clever use of props shone briefly through in their ‘can of coke’ sketch; it was tight, witty, and physically amusing, and one wished more of the show could have been the same.

Twenty-Four would probably have benefitted from having a director. A third pair of eyes would have likely done a great deal in cutting what needed to be cut, as well as drawing the performers’ attention to how to make the show as appealing as possible. The overarching plot device of twenty-four hours in a day seemed almost irrelevant, failing to be reflected in any of the sketches and only cursively mentioned at the beginning and the end. The lack of transitions made the show feel disjointed and, to an extent, lazy.

Despite there being certain points of humour in Twenty-Four, they eventually numbered all too few. The performers’ failure to fully inhabit any of the characters whom they created sadly left them awkward and forced onstage.

Twenty-Four – The Sketch Show is on at the Pembroke New Cellars until 7 February